I don’t see them joining anything?
I mean, let’s be real, what major function has Mozilla implemented into Firefox that hasn’t been opt-out? And no, UI doesn’t count, I’m talking features.
The problem isn’t the existence of AI. The problem is the inescapably of it and how, under Microsoft or Google, it will harvest your data whether you like it or not. When you tell them “fuck off, leave me alone, and keep my words out of your AI’s mouth”, they’re not going to listen. Profit motive requires them to invade.
Mozilla is a non-profit, and they’ve long been very good about letting you opt out things, and listening. I’m not worried about them putting AI into Firefox, because I can be reasonably sure it will be optional, in a way I know the others won’t.
I’d rather they didn’t go chasing this car at all, to be honest, because they’re not likely to catch it, but whatever. They’re renewing focus on the browser and I’m taking that as a win.
I can’t contest the first point cause I’m not a firefox junkie, so I won’t.
What I will contest is that the existence of AI, or, deep learning, or LLMs, or neural networks, or matrix multiplication, or whatever type of shit they come up with next, I’ll contest that it isn’t problematic. I kind of think it is, inherently, I think it’s existence is not great. Mostly because it obfuscates, even internally, the processing of data, it obfuscates the inputs from the outputs, the works from the results. You can do that with regular programming just fine, just as you can do most of the shit that AI does with normal programming, like that guy who made a program that calculates the prices for japanese baked goods and also recognizes cancer, right. But I think AI is a step further than that, it obfuscates it more. I kind of am skeptical of it’s broad implementation.
For trivial use cases, it’s kind of fine, but I think maybe use cases we might consider trivial, otherwise are kind of fucked, maybe. AI summary of an article? I dunno if that’s good. We might think, oh, this is kind of trivial because the user should just not really trust what the AI says, but, as with all technology, what if the user is an idiot and a moron? They might just use it to read the article for them, and then spout off whatever talking points and headlines it gives them. I can’t really think of a scenario where that’s actually a good thing, and it’s highly possible. It might make it easier to parse an article, like that, but I don’t think that’s actually a good or useful tool, it’s just presented a kind of illusion of utility, most especially because it was redundant (we could just write a summary and have it at the top of the article, like every article on the face of the earth), and it was totally beyond our control, at least, in most circumstances.
Also, the Mozilla Foundation is nonprofit, but the Mozilla Corporation is not. The Foundation manages the Corp, which manages Firefox development. So depending on which one you’re referring to, it might be a non-profit, or it might not be. In any case, the nonprofit is a step removed from Firefox development, which I think is an important side-note, even if it’s not actually that relevant to whatever conversations about AI there might be.
We already have AI in Firefox. And not gonna lie, offline (I.e. absolutely private) translations for webpages is pretty neat.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian or Japanese. So far most of the times I have had to translate a page, Firefox didn’t support the language.
It’s really good but I do wish it supported more languages like Russian
It’s never too late to learn the language of enemy!
Let me share some fun Mozilla facts about their previous CEO who has now stepped down to “executive chairwoman” last week.
She received 6.9 million dollars in 2022 and 5 million in 2021, 3 million in 2020.
Her replacement is an executive from AirBnB and eBay. We will find out how much both of these are earning in 2025 when they release their financial statements.
They fired 60 staff and are adding AI to their flagship program to earn more money.
Tell me this is a good thing.
Tell me this is a good thing.
Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.
ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody’s freaking out about the AI stuff but that’s because they’re only reading the headlines. The programs they’ve shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla’s metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).
As a software developer I am huge supporter of Mozilla’s developer initiatives from Manifest V2 implementation to MDN. But it’s also important to be realistic Mozilla has long had major money problems, and not the kind that giving them more would fix.
The Lunduke shit again? The one that takes offense to money being donated to support “politics” i.e abortion rights?
Take a look at the other trash he posts on his reddit profile. That blog is not a trustworthy source, by any stretch, and it’s sweetly ignoring that he’s not looking at Mozilla’s spending alone, but of 3 separate entities that exist under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation.
I don’t think this is a money making move. The previous CEO was absolutely overly focused on monetization and this move is a step away from that. I should’ve addressed this more explicitly in the above comment but even for the players who actively monetize, AI is a money incinerator.
Tell me this is a good thing.
Ok. Mozilla was spreading itself too thin, spending resources trying to compete with multiple products against established brands that were already way ahead of them. They needed to focus down onto their core product rather than frivolously cast about.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject. It’s being incorporated into the other major browsers, it’s a must-have if Firefox is to remain relevant. I’m sure you’ll be able to turn it off in the settings if you don’t want it and if you’re really concerned about getting AI cooties there’ll be niche forks that are compiled without it.
And the ever increasing CEO wages and hiring of AirBnB/eBay executive as CEO? Their previous CEOs salary alone could’ve covered everyone of those employees fired.
That part’s not good. I was addressing the “They fired 60 staff and are adding AI to their flagship program to earn more money.” Part.
I agree with you that Mozilla is spreading itself too thin. And don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox and am a long time user. But they do need to understand their user base better.
They aren’t going to become a sustainable business by copying more popular browsers. It’s their differences from the mainstream that make them appealing as an alternative in the first place. I already don’t like them foisting Pocket on me, which 100% should have remained an extension. I don’t like the fact that Google is their default search engine, which goes against all their privacy messaging. I understand the reason is money, but that’s kind of the definition of being a sellout isn’t it? Their core values should always come first.
Fact is, those employees weren’t fired for any good reason other than to hop on the latest tech trend. It’s this sort of corporate “profit before people” bullshit that will erode any goodwill that people still have towards Mozilla. I couldn’t give a fuck about adding a stupid AI driven chatbot to Mozilla, and neither, I imagine, do many of their current users. Honestly, I think “AI” has ruined the internet in a lot of ways already. It’s already had a massive negative impact on the quality of search results, across all major search engines, because of all the low quality llm content that has been produced already, and it’s only going to get worse. And you can’t trust a single thing that comes out of those models, so what is even the point of them?
Sorry in advance for the old man rant lol.
As fair as I am aware, Mozilla so far is only thinking about integrating AI in relatively smart ways that leverage their limited resources well. (There were some rumours a while back about using ai locally to search your history and tabs, as well as (arguable if this counts as AI, but branding is everything) on device translation)
They had 400m in cash in 2022, they don’t have any sustainability issues.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
Yeah because we’ve never seen tech fads before heralded as the next big thing. If I could roll my eyes any harder we could harness that for power generation.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
You have no idea, any more than the rest of us. Like, please tell me you understand “____ is the technology of the future” has been said more times than it’s ever been true.
The idea of AI is a technology of the future, but what we have growing now is not AI, not really, and this iteration can be just as big a flop as any other technology of the moment.
LLMs are what everyone dunks on, and “image generators are coming for our jobs! Think of artists! It’s not real art if a cheating machine does it!” is also a common cry.
But do any of those people even know about the new class of antibiotics a neural network trained to find patterns in protein folding discovered? Do any of them know about the accuracy of diagnosis that IBM Watson was able to make in cases of rare cancers, even when doctors didn’t see it? What about changes in weather prediction accuracy? Novel suggestions in materials science?
We are mimicking neural patterns, similar to the way our own minds work, to achieve pattern recognition and even extrapolate from them. And yeah, right now we’re brute forcing it, and we’re not even entirely sure how these relationships develop. It’s in its infancy, and growing fast.
This is technology considered the holy grail of computing. We have been chasing this concept since the 1940s. There are a million sci-fi stories about it and there are a million more attempts to make it work before one really stuck.
And now we’re at the beginning of it being practical and you think we’re just gonna go “eh it’s a wet fart like the Virtual Boy. Oh well, let’s make some new phones or something”?
No. This is literally the technology of the future. Within your lifetime (assuming you live a reasonable while longer) there will come a point when you won’t be able to buy a CPU without some type of neural engine in it.
And yes, people will (and already are) do horrific shit with it. It will fuck over a large portion of the white collar economy; a portion of which were told to go into the careers they did because they’d be safe from automation. “Get a degree and you’ll be safe!” they told us! Now they tell us “you better work at two different targets to make that payment, should have studied a trade!”
So the reason for skepticism and animosity is almost certainly the fear of being replaced; but look at how far these AI models have come in the last month alone. We’re already in “this is changing the future” territory and those things are just getting started.
And AI is the technology of the future, despite all the whinging and griping by commenters on the subject.
The entire discussion is to distract ourselves from the raw truth:
Fax machines are the technology of the future.
Fax machines will outlive us all. AI and VR will reach their heyday, then wane with years and be replaced. But whatever replaces them will sit quietly in the shadow of the everlasting Fax machine.
The answers to both of those things depends very heavily on the details. I think focusing on their main products is a good thing, but adding AI sounds like one of those likely terrible decisions. We definitely need privacy friendly & open source based AI though, in all areas, so I hope this is Mozilla pushing for something sensible here.
You’re right. Mozilla is the devil. Everyone go to the better option in Silicon Valley for web browsing…
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Her replacement is an executive from AirBnB and eBay. We will find out how much both of these are earning in 2025 when they release their financial statements.
Can you tell me what they were doing at either of those companies, or what they’ve been doing at Mozilla since they were hired there? Have you done any actual research into this, at all, are you just assuming that because you saw two shitty companies on the resume, they must be a champion of those shitty companies?
Things to add to your product when you want to look hip and trendy, but dont have any real ideas how to make your product better:
- 1990s: visitor counter
- 1995: Popups
- 2000s: flash intros
- 2005: stock photography
- 2010: local weather widget
- 2015: share to social media widgets
- 2020: fullsize 4k background stock videos
- 2024: AI assistant
I’m not sure if you remember, but site rings were what you used instead of Google. They were useful.
And I’ve seen some guest books with lots of people at some point in my childhood, but about half a year after that everybody firmly chose in favor of hierarchical boards.
And I don’t share that hate for <marquee>, it served the purpose of showing you a long line in a small space, implicitly saying that it’s secondary temporary information, a bit like on TV.
And what’s wrong with animated GIFs, animation is nice.
They would be abused by spam bots in an instant, even before you could write your own “welcome to my guestbook” post.
And yet Microsoft added a weather (and bullshit) widget to windows in like 2020
